Search This Blog

#7 'Strangers' with Dr Jay Prosser

For our seventh session, we will be joined by Dr Jay Prosser for a special session on 'Strangers.' The session is intended to develop and complicate our thinking on strangers in Ahmed's work.

Dr Prosser is Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds. He recommends that attendees read the following chapters from Tabish Khair's The New Xenophobia (2016) and Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others (2017) alongside a blog post from Ahmed on 'Making Strangers'.

A PDF of the Toni Morrison text is available here, and A PDF of the Tabish Khair text is available here.

Back in October, for our first session of the academic year, we explored the figure of 'the stranger' in Ahmed's work through a reading of her essay, 'Embodying Strangers,' and Audré Lorde's essay 'Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*'. We considered how the stranger is produced by the subject (and vice versa) in an economy of touch: this is to say, “‘my body’ is possible in its particularity only through encountering other bodies, ‘your body’, ‘her body’ and so on" (47). Key to Ahmed's conception of strangers is also that the sense that the stranger is a priori produced as strange: “the figure of the ‘stranger’ is produced, not as that which we fail to recognise, but as that which we have already recognised as ‘a stranger’ […] we flesh out the beyond, and give it a face and form” (3). With Dr Jay Prosser, we will chart the correspondences between Ahmed, Khair, and Morrison's thinking. We will also discuss their value in conceptualising contemporary forms of strangeness and otherness.

All welcome!

Details: Tuesday 20th February, 5-6:30pm, LHRI, Room 1.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We are delighted to announce that Sara Ahmed will be joining us at the University of Leeds* for a public lecture on Friday 11th May 2018. She will be presenting a talk, entitled ‘Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy,’ based on her current research into complaints of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct and bullying at universities. The talk will be followed by a short Q&A and a wine reception. The lecture will take place in Conference Auditorium 1, near the Edge.

Sara Ahmed is an independent scholar and the author of eight monographs, the most recent of which being Living a Feminist Life (2017). She also maintains a lively and popular blog, feminist killjoys.

Attendance is free but booking is essential as places are limited. You can reserve at ticket via Eventbrite here. If you reserve a ticket but find yourself unable to attend for any reason, please contact us at quiltingpoints@gmail.com so we may pass your ticket on to someone else.

#1: 'Gender and Identity' 04/10/2018
Thursday 4 October | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI: Room 1 | All Welcome
For our first session of the academic year we will be discussing Judith Butler's ideas around gender and identity as explored in her essay "Performance Acts and Gender Constitution" and in the "Conclusion" of Gender Trouble. (Pdfs downloadable on links above).

In 'Performance Acts and Gender Constitution’ Butler distills her early conception of gender performativity. She advances the idea that gender is a verb not a noun, created through repeated acts. She connects this process to the regulation of a binary gender system which is necessitated and produced by “compulsory heterosexuality.” In the ‘Conclusion’ of Gender Trouble she revisits these arguments in relation to subjectivity, identity politics and agency.

For our first session of the new semester, and our sixth session of the year, we will be reading sections from both the introduction and conclusion of Living a Feminist Life (2017)

Both readings expand upon Ahmed's conceptualisation of the feminist killjoy within The Promise of Happiness (2010), creating a radical articulation of contemporary feminism delivered in an accessible style. Concluding Living a Feminist Life with a 'killjoy manifesto', Ahmed challenges killjoys to expose the myths encouraged by neoliberalism and global capitalism, rejecting the principle of happiness as a political cause. Join us for a timely discussion of how to 'make feminisms work in the places we live, the places we work', bringing 'theory back to life' and much more.